Lately I've been kind of obsessed with Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma. That book, combined with the recent Eat Local Challenge is changing the way I think about food and food production in this country. Admittedly, I still fall short when it comes to eating totally locally/sustainably, but I'm certainly trying a lot harder than I ever did before, which has to count for something.
Via Ruhlman, I found an article about the National Animal Identification System. Ostensibly, NAIS is a plan by the USDA to track farm animals in order to reduce outbreaks of disease. Sounds like a good thing, right? Everyone wants to eat a nice clean rib-eye steak.
The jist of NAIS is that every location where livestock is grown would be assigned a numeric code, and every individual animal would also be given another code, via an implanted RFID tag. All this data gets pumped into some ginormous national database, and then the government could track disease outbreaks, and have the ability to find any other animals a diseased animal might have had contact with. Healthy food for everyone, in theory at least.
Alas, it turns out that NAIS is less about food safety than it is about presererving business interests: the interests of factory farms, and the interests of companies that manufacture the equipment that would be used to track the animals. The plan was hatched by a private organization that consists mostly of factory farming interests like Cargill, Monsanto, the National Pork Producers Council and the National Renderers Association. Oh yeah, the guys that make the tracking devices (Cattle-Traq and Digital Angel) are down with the plan too. There's a bazillion cows and chickens and pigs out there, and at about a buck a head, there's lots of money to be made microchipping our future food.
NAIS would definitely hurt the little guy. The costs associated with tracking are fairly fixed, but a small farmer with less livestock has fewer opportunitites to recoup that cost. The result? Prices go up, and it's one more way the small farmer can't stay competitive with the big boys. Factory farms, on the other hand, can spread the costs amongst thousands of animals they "process" every day, and the new systems are easy to integrate into tracking systems they already use.
The worst part is that, while factory farms are the only ones that would benefit from the system, (mostly in the form of better PR) they're the ones with the conditions that cause all of the nasty diseases that NAIS is claiming to try to prevent. And to add insult to injury, all NAIS proposes to do is track animals. There's nothing in the plan that attempts to address the problems with factory farming that would actually make our food safer. It's all just number crunching... and dollar signs, of course.
For more information on helping to protect the little guy, check out NoNAIS.org.
